Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman

Bateman, H[ezekiah] L[inthicum] (1812–75), manager and actor. After making his stage debut in his native Baltimore in 1832, he continued acting for many years. However, when his daughters Kate and Ellen proved to be child prodigies, he gave up acting to take over their management. Thereafter he acted only on rare occasions, usually in support of his daughters or in one of his wife's plays. He himself wrote several plays for Kate, including Rosa Gregorio; or, the Corsican Vendetta (1862). His wife was playwright Mrs. BATEMAN [née Sidney Frances Cowell] (1823–81), a New Yorker, who also started her career as a performer but was best known for her playwriting. Her finest play was one of her first, Self (1856), a study of a girl with cruel, greedy parents. Among her later plays were Geraldine; or, Love's Victory (1858), a complicated tragedy of family feuds in the time of Edward I, and Evangeline (1860), a play written to allow Kate Bateman to portray the popular figure of Canadian and American legend. Their daughter Kate BATEMAN (1842–1917) was born in Baltimore and made her debut in 1846 in Louisville in Babes in the Woods. With her sister Ellen she then toured, as a child prodigy, in the leading roles of Richard III (Kate was Richmond; Ellen, Richard) and other classics as well as in dramas written especially for them. In 1860 she won applause as an ingenue playing the title role of her mother's play Evangeline, but it was her performance as Julia in The Hunchback in 1862 that raised her to star status. The next year she first essayed what became her most famous role, the title part of the Jewess deserted by her Christian lover in Leah, the Forsaken, co‐produced by her father. Of her portrayal of Leah, the Albion wrote, “Its merits are strength, impetuosity and pathos. Its profound defect is its lack of emotional abandon.” She also won praise for her Pauline in The Lady of Lyons (1866) and for her interpretation as the falsely accused and imprisoned heroine of Mary Warner (1869). Meanwhile, H. L. Bateman's production of La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) began the long rage in America for French opéra bouffe, and for two more years he continued mounting the operettas. In 1871 he and his wife followed Kate to London, where all three remained for the rest of their lives. Autobiography: (Mrs. Bateman): Reminiscences, 1873.

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